Loneliness

Loneliness… feeling alone even in a crowd… everyone must have felt lonely sometime or the other. Usually, it is due to the mood swings. But in my case, I have realized that I’m happy and cheerful during my mood swings (which occurs very rarely) and somber otherwise.

I have been alone all the time, since the day I remember. When I was very young, I was all alone until my brother was born. But we used to do only one thing together and that was fighting and hitting each other with whatever came into our hands, pulling each other’s hair, which has now thankfully, diminished to only quarreling and hurtling the choicest of words from our little Sourashtra vocabulary that we have.

Even today I feel like an alien among the earthlings. Either I am invisible to the people around me or I feel as if I am an ugly attachment to the group of people I am with, just like the hump on ‘the Hunchback of Notre dame’.

Basically, I am a very detached person… I don’t become friends with people easily and don’t even feel sad when I have to part with my friends. I need to be close to a person, like sit together in the class or something like that, for a very long time before one naturally becomes my friend. And in this instant kaapi world, this is not practical. Is that the reason why I am lonely?

In the 21 years of my life on this planet, I have realized that I unconsciously imbibe the characteristics of the people I am close to… kind of transformation of my personality to become a reflection of another person. Eeeks! Gives me the creeps!
For the above given reason, I have to choose my friends ultra carefully…someone similar to me but different. Is that a reason why I have very few friends?

I once read in a psychology book that in the late teens and early adulthood, people yearn to be accepted by their peers and are in constant search for someone who can listen to them and with whom they can talk to. Now, some very fortunate ones have their parents, usually their mother, as their first best friend. I am not close to my parents either. Our talks are limited to only information sharing and nothing like sharing of each other’s feelings… you know what I mean?

Is that the reason why many youngsters fall in love at this age? Leave the role of the hormones in attracting people of the opposite sex to each other as in the cases of ‘love at first sight’. I mean the love that blooms after the couple understand each other well enough and the umpteen number of times they keep asking themselves and the others around them…”Kya yehi pyaar hai?” only to be answered “Haan, yehi pyaar hai!”

My theory is that, when you are feeling lonely and want a person to open your heart to, the first person (or the only person) who really listens to you and shares your feelings is the person you naturally fall in love with. It’s not that you always fall in love with such a person, but there is higher probability of that understanding turning into true love, especially when the person is of the opposite sex, though it can be true friendship too. Now, it entirely depends on them.

I once read somewhere that it is in the loneliness that you become closer to God. And in my case, I found that it was true. One reason being that I haven’t found the person I talked about in the previous paragraph. So instead of falling in love, my belief in God has become stronger than ever.

I like Lord Ganesha. Whenever I pray to him, he listens to me and also grants my wishes. Well, I’ll give you a small example. This may sound very crazy or even childish, but it will give you an idea of how your true wishes will be granted if you believe in God... One day as I was going to the college, I prayed to him, ”Oh Lord! My life is so boring. Make it exciting, please!”

And that whole day my friend and I were laughing over something very unusual that happened in the morning at college. Even if I do explain what happened, no one would understand or find it funny at all ‘coz it is something that only we two share.

In an interview I saw on Sunday, Kamal Hasan said, ”A person (an artist) is never alone…he may be alone in a crowd, but he is always surrounded by his thoughts.” Now I understand… I have not been alone, after all. My thoughts have given me constant company all through my life.

So the next time you are lonely, be happy that you are going to find light at the end of the tunnel in the form of true love or God... as for the others like me, enjoy hanging around with your thoughts!